QuantEcon / QuantEcon/scipy_tutorial_2026

Should the HTML build run on a GPU runner (RunsOn) for accurate horse-race timings?

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#5 2 comments 0 reactions 1 assignee View on GitHub

@Smit-create is already working on this.

Since Jun 4, 2026.

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Description

@Smit-create — a question for you on infra.

Context

The final lecture, schelling_jax_parallel.md, ends with a timed "horse race" between NumPy, JAX-sequential, and JAX-parallel implementations. Its whole conclusion is that the parallel JAX algorithm wins on a GPU ("shines on GPUs", "algorithm structure matters").

The participant experience is fine: the Colab notebooks in notebooks/ are committed unexecuted (no baked-in outputs), so participants generate their own GPU timings live on Colab. ✅

The gap is only in the published website HTML:

  • lectures/_config.yml uses execute_notebooks: "cache", so code runs at build time and the printed Converged in … seconds numbers get baked into the rendered site.
  • Both ci.yml and publish.yml use runs-on: ubuntu-latestGitHub-hosted CPU, no GPU.

On CPU the parallel algorithm is expected to be the slowest (it deliberately does uniform/redundant work per agent for SIMT efficiency, and needs more iterations) — so the static site can show timing numbers that contradict the lecture's conclusion.

The question

We have a RunsOn image already defined in .github/runs-on.yml:

images:
  quantecon_ubuntu2404:
    platform: "linux"
    arch: "x64"
    ami: "ami-0edec81935264b6d3"
    region: "us-west-2"

…but the workflows don't reference it — they still use ubuntu-latest.

Smit: do you want this repo's build to run on a GPU instance via RunsOn so the published HTML horse-race timings are accurate? If so:

  1. Is the existing quantecon_ubuntu2404 image GPU-capable, or do we need a GPU instance type + a CUDA/GPU-enabled AMI?
  2. Which workflow(s) should move to the GPU runner — just publish.yml (the site that gets the baked timings), or ci.yml too?
  3. Are the RunsOn credentials/app already enabled on QuantEcon/scipy_tutorial_2026?

Alternatives if GPU CI isn't worth it

  • Add a one-line admonition on the lecture page noting the displayed timings are from a CPU build and that Colab GPU gives representative numbers; or
  • Leave as-is, since the live workshop runs on Colab GPU and the static numbers are a minor footnote.

Related: #4 (CI currently red on the Netlify preview step — separate infra issue).

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